Strange Are the Ways

by Strange Are the Ways (retail) (epub)

  ‘Margarita? What in the world is wrong?’

  She had sat in that room for nearly three hours, waiting. Long enough for cold hatred to fill the vacuum when the fires of fury and pain had died. ‘Who’s Valentina?’ she asked, her voice quiet and firm, as she had planned it. And then, when he did not answer, ‘Sasha?’ Her control was not as absolute as she had thought; she could not contain her rage. Her voice rose, shrilly accusing. ‘Did you hear me? I asked – who’s Valentina?’

  The words had hit like a hammer blow. He stood, shocked and silenced, knowing his guilt to be written upon his face, utterly unable to disguise it.

  She advanced upon him. In her hand she held a crumpled and grubby piece of paper. He recognized it; closed his eyes for a second in an agony of self-castigation. In the name of God! Why hadn’t he thrown the damned thing away? Once only had he used it, once only since it had arrived. He had gone one day to see the run-down apartment house where she now lived – where she had moved, he knew, to escape him, despite the later weakening of her resolve. He had gone simply to see it; he had not been able to bear the thought of not knowing where she was, of not being able, in those secret times when he could not keep her from his mind, to fit her into her surroundings, however squalid they might be. He had to know where she was. Like a stupid, love-lorn boy he had stood outside the dismal, dilapidated building, almost the twin of the other, for five, perhaps ten minutes; then he had left. He had not communicated with Valentina.

  ‘Answer me!’ Margarita stood very close to him, glaring up at him, face taut and fine-drawn with rage. ‘Answer me, damn you!’

  ‘Margarita –’

  ‘Who is Valentina?’

  He did not, could not, answer.

  She stepped back from him. ‘You pig,’ she said, suddenly unnaturally calm. ‘You disgusting animal. No! Get away from me – don’t touch me. Don’t dare!’ He had stepped towards her, hand outstretched. He stopped as she recoiled from his touch. She shuddered theatrically, white-faced. ‘Get away from me,’ she said. ‘Go to your whore. Do whatever filthy things you do with her.’ She saw the flinch of pain in his face that he could not hide, and laughed. ‘Filthy!’ she spat again. Quite suddenly and absolutely silently tears were coursing down her cheeks. With an oddly abrupt movement she sat down on the bed. For the first time he noticed the chaos around them; the torn and crumpled clothes, the shards of a broken mirror upon the floor. ‘I’ll never forgive you,’ she said. ‘Never. Not for as long as I live.’

  ‘Margarita, please – listen to me.’ All too aware of her condition, he was frightened by the look of her. Careful not to touch her, he went down on one knee beside her. She turned her head away, refusing to look at him.

  ‘Valentina is – is just a girl I met – a working girl – she means nothing to me – believe me, Margarita – nothing.’ He heard the words and he despised himself; an emotion he saw reflected in his young wife’s face. Whatever else she was, Margarita was no-one’s fool.

  She turned, looked coldly into his face that was on a level with hers. ‘Oh?’ She lifted the paper she still held clutched in her hand. ‘Yet she doesn’t seem to feel the same way?’ She had read it so often in the past hours she did not have to look at it. She kept her eyes steadily and fiercely upon his face. ‘Sasha,’ she said, ‘The new address – I’m sorry my love – I swore to myself and to the God in which we both know I don’t believe that I wouldn’t send it. But you knew I would. Didn’t you?’ She stopped, watching him. ‘DIDN’T YOU?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘This is – just a girl you met? A girl who means nothing to you? A little whore you visit, use and leave? Leave to come home to me – to lie to me – to force me into your bed – to risk my life to have your child?’ Her voice was bitter, full of malice.

  He did not guard his face. He let her hurt him, let her see she hurt him, in the hope of placating her; in the comfortless hope of absolving himself.

  ‘Then “why, oh why does she love you so much”, Sasha?’ The words were unnaturally quiet, totally at odds with the blaze of her eyes and the trembling of the pale, small-boned hand that clutched the note. ‘Why, when she means nothing to you? That is what you said, isn’t it?’

  He tried to preserve his refuge of silence.

  ‘Sasha? That is what you said?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Say it again.’ She leaned to him, her low voice savage. ‘Sasha. Look at me and say it.’

  He sat back on his heels. Lifted his dark head. In both movements there was an odd submission, a surrender. ‘She means nothing to me,’ he said.

  ‘But you’ve – you’ve known her. Known her body.’ It was not a question. ‘You’ve rutted with her. Like the animal you are.’

  He bowed his head.

  ‘Sasha?’

  He knew what she wanted, knew what she was doing. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve known her.’

  ‘So. It’s as I thought. She is a whore, this “girl you met” – this Valentina?’

  After a long moment he lifted his head again and met her eyes. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Say it,’ she said, softly; mercilessly.

  ‘She’s a whore.’ In the few heartbeats of silence before he spoke her face had hardened further.

  ‘A filthy whore,’ she said.

  He shook his head, flinching from the words.

  ‘Say it!’

  He turned his face from her.

  With raging strength she buried her fingers in his hair and dragged him back to face her. Face wrenched in pain, he made no attempt to defend himself. ‘Say it!’ she screamed.

  ‘She’s a filthy whore.’ The words, deservedly, almost choked him.

  She twisted her hand in his hair once more, deliberately cruel, before letting him go. ‘And what,’ she asked then, once more savagely quiet, ‘does that make you?’

  A coward. As I have always been. As I have always known. A coward. You cannot shame me more than I shame myself. He said nothing.

  She stood, moved past him to the door. ‘A brute,’ she said. ‘That’s what it makes you. A worthless, faithless, disgusting brute. Get out. Leave me alone.’

  ‘Margarita!’ He came to his feet, took a step towards her.

  She turned from him, walked from the room across the hall and into the sitting room. He followed, stood by the door, watching her. She walked to the sideboard, swept the small theatre from it with one fierce motion of her hand. The little structure splintered, the tiny cardboard figures flying in all directions. ‘Get out,’ she said again, her voice rising, a dangerous edge of hysteria in it. ‘Do you hear me? Leave me alone! Go and play your squalid games with your – disgusting – Valentina –’ She was sobbing now, yet managed to invest the word with a grotesque mimicry of passion.

  He stood helpless. A step towards her brought another piercing shriek. ‘Get out, I say! Get away from me!’

  He went. He stood for a long time, tensely, outside the door listening to the sounds of destruction within; the smashing of glass, the fierce, emotional sobbing. Then he moved slowly down the stairs, shoulders hunched, and out into the chill night air.

  It was a very long time before Margarita’s passion spent itself. She smashed everything she could pick up, throwing glasses and ornaments at walls and mirrors, stamping upon the remains of her precious theatre, flinging herself down like a child in a paroxysm of rage to beat her fists upon the floor. At last she ran back into the bedroom, threw herself upon the bed amongst the pile of ruined clothes and abandoned herself to loud and ugly sobbing, crying as if she would never stop.

  Later, at last, she calmed. She stood for a long while in front of the tall, cracked mirror, looking at her distorted reflection.

  A voice sounded in her head, mocking, insinuating. ‘Does he love her truly? Is he faithful to her?’

  And: ‘Of course I’m sure. I made him up. I invented him.’

  Her eyes were puffed and swollen, her face blotched and unsightly with crying, her hair dull and tang
led. She looked with loathing at the swell of her breasts, the firm lift of her belly. She thought of Sasha.

  He must be punished for this. Punished and punished and punished again.

  In the building next door, in the basement apartment with its discreet side door and its eerie, darkly-curtained rooms lived the woman who had been so understanding – so very understanding – about Margarita’s reluctance to become pregnant. She had, so rumour had it, many other skills.

  With firm and determined movements Margarita went to her dressing table, opened a drawer, took out a key, unlocked with it another, smaller drawer and extracted a small, chinking bag of coins.

  * * *

  She miscarried three days later. Sasha, sent for by his worried parents-in-law, flew home to the apartment to find Margarita abed; beautiful, transparently pale, patently and appallingly ill, and terrified. His fault. He knew it. Saw it in her eyes as she looked at him, flinched from him, turned away from him eyes from which all fire had flown, driven out by the terror of the moment. She was bleeding badly. The doctor tutted and sent him from the room.

  ‘In God’s name, lad.’ Victor, waiting in the sitting room, feet astride, stocky form bristling with anxiety and indignation, was gruff. ‘What’s been going on here?’ All the best efforts of Varya and her daughter-in-law Natalia had not been able to eliminate the signs of violence from the room. A broken picture was propped against the wall. A bucket of shattered glass and porcelain stood by the door. The pathetic wreckage of Margarita’s theatre was stacked in a cardboard box.

  Sasha dropped to his knees beside it, sorting through it, handling the silly, brightly-coloured cardboard pieces as if they had been spun glass. ‘We – we had an argument, Victor Valerievich –’

  ‘An argument? Indeed?’ His father-in-law looked with lifted eyebrows about the room.

  Sasha stood up. ‘Margarita was – very upset – distraught –’ He stopped as he heard the bedroom door open, the doctor’s voice in the small hallway. Both men waited.

  ‘She’s to rest.’ Quiet Natalia slipped into the room.

  ‘But – she’ll be all right?’ Anxiously Sasha stepped forward.

  His sister-in-law moved a little away from him. The look she sent him was wary. Natalia was not used to the kind of passions that produced a near-wrecked apartment and – it surely had to be deduced? – a miscarriage. She was uncomfortable with them. ‘Yes. The danger is past. She’s lost a great deal of blood and she requires careful nursing, but the doctor thinks she’ll be all right.’

  ‘May I see her?’ Sasha was humble.

  She cast a small, sideways glance at him. ‘I’ll ask Varya Petrovna.’

  Margarita lay exhausted upon her pillows. Had she known the terrors of the trial she had brought upon herself she would never have dared to undertake it; but it was done, and triumph was hers. With a small sigh she turned her head from Sasha’s desperate and guilt-ridden face and settled herself to sleep, the sound of her mother’s voice in her ears.

  Sasha Kolashki spent the following few weeks neglecting his duties in order to scour St Petersburg for the best designed, most splendid and beautiful toy theatre that the city could produce. On the day that, not without qualms, he presented it to his recuperating wife, the same day that she offered him the first ghost of a smile since Valentina’s name had fallen between them like a sword, he swore, with every best intention, never to see Valentina again.

  * * *

  ‘Why Pikku Kulda?’ Katya and Jussi were sitting on the verandah, well wrapped but appreciating the pale sunshine. ‘What does it mean?’ Through the trees the still ice-fringed lake glimmered.

  ‘It means –’ he thought for a moment ‘– “little darling” – “sweetheart” – literally, “little gold one”. It was my grandfather’s nickname for my grandmother. He built this place for her. It was their retreat. She loved it.’

  Something in his voice drew her eyes to him. ‘What happened to them? Your grandparents?’

  ‘My grandfather was exiled to Siberia, and died there. My grandmother was never strong. Grief killed her.’ He spoke with little emotion, but she did not miss the narrowing of his eyes as he looked out across the quiet vista of lake and forest.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He shrugged. ‘There’s no need to be. It’s hardly your fault.’

  ‘Kaarlo would say it was. I’m Russian.’ She turned on the bench to look at him. ‘Or am I? I am, after all, married to a Finn.’ Her voice was very quiet.

  He turned his head. The silence that fell between them was neither inconsequential nor empty. Neither looked away from the other. In these past, strange weeks a friendship – a companionship – had grown between them that neither would deny, and that the others, even Kaarlo, had come to accept. What had begun as an enforced intimacy had grown into a true enjoyment of each other’s company. They joked and they argued, she had asked to be told more of this unknown struggle in which she had found herself so unexpectedly embroiled, and with quiet and unexpected passion – and the unasked help of Heimo and Kaarlo – he had told her. Despite the odd circumstances – perhaps even because of them – a camaraderie had grown between the four of them, marred only by Kaarlo’s obviously ingrainedat least now marginally less obvious distrust of her.

  And then, yesterday, all had changed.

  She had seen him naked, and with a shock that had been like a blow she had wanted him. And he had known it.

  The three young men had gone to the sauna – a habit that Katya, in this still freezing weather, had resolutely refused to acquire. Her bathing was done, amidst much on the whole good-natured grumbling, in decent privacy and warmth before the big stove in the living room, the men excluded firmly for the duration. The Finnish passion for steaming themselves into a stupor in order to shock themselves awake by plunging through the broken ice into the bitterly cold waters of the lake struck her as being mildly demented, to say nothing of masochistic, and nothing the others could say would persuade her. Usually she stayed within the house whilst the peculiar communal ritual took place; yesterday however, in the first of the springlike sunshine, she had been walking on the lakeshore, delighting in the fresh green that showed where the snow had melted, the amazing delicacy of growth that in defiance of the still freezing temperatures was beginning to appear. In a few weeks, she knew, the lakeside would be a tangle of wild flowers – coltsfoot, buttercup, harebell and clover, marguerites turning their pretty faces to the sun. Later there would be lilies on the lake and the tall spikes of Rose Bay waist-high beside the water. And where, as these flowers greeted the summer beside the stretch of water she had come to know so well, would she be? Deep in her own thoughts she had hardly heard the shouts, the splashing, the strong male voices of the others as with whoops and laughter they had fled like high-spirited boys the small, log-built sauna and leapt naked into the waters of the lake. Some minutes later, still thoughtful she had come from the trees and there he had been – tall, slender, winter-white as marble, the pucker of the healed scar dark and still a little inflamed upon his smooth shoulder, his skin slick with water, fair head glittering as he laughed in the sunshine. As the others had splashed and shouted in horseplay in the water he had seen her. And had known, she was certain of it, the almost frightening shock of physical desire that had jolted through her at the sight of that bright body. She had turned and all but run from him. Neither had mentioned the incident. Yet now, eyes locked, it was in both their minds, and both knew it.

  ‘Married to a Finn,’ he repeated, softly, as if testing the words.

  ‘And yet – not married at all,’ she said.

  He smiled.

  She was finding it oddly difficult to breathe normally.

  ‘This isn’t the time,’ he said.

  ‘No. I know.’

  ‘I have nothing to offer.’ He waved a hand, encompassing the cabin, the lake, the countryside surrounding it. ‘I’m committed.’

  ‘I know that too,’ she said. And then, ‘But so am I
, aren’t I? You married me, after all – it was legal, I assume?’

  ‘It was legal.’

  ‘The winter’s over.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Something has to happen. Something has to change.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you let me leave?’

  The silence was a thoughtful one. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You trust me? Not to betray you all?’

  ‘Should I?’ His eyes were very bright.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I do.’

  ‘And –’ She could sustain that clear blue gaze no longer. She looked down at her clasped hands. ‘– And – if I don’t want to go?’

  This time the quiet lasted so long that she was forced to lift her eyes to his again. He was watching her intently. ‘You don’t have to be afraid of Kaarlo,’ he said, carefully.

  ‘I’m not afraid of Kaarlo.’

  He smiled. Put out a hand.

  She took it. ‘One thing.’

  ‘Yes?’ The other two were coming. They could see them toiling along the track from the lake, fishing tackle in hand, the enticing gleam of silver glinting from the basket Heimo carried.

  ‘That night – in St Petersburg – when I came –’ She stopped, blundered painfully on. ‘You know – you can guess? – what had happened to me – what I’d – what I’d done?’

  He nodded. ‘It isn’t important.’

  ‘It is.’ She had been struggling with this ever since yesterday, ever since that strange, irrevocable turning point had been reached. She had to say it. ‘Jussi, I may not be a wife. But I’m not a virgin either.’

  He grinned then, half at her, half at the other two as they called from the edge of the clearing. His hand was hard and warm and reassuring upon hers. ‘It’s a wicked world we live in, my Katya,’ he said. ‘Who is?’